Sakurai, who has called modern DLC a "scam," said, "I think there might be criticism that we are cutting up content to sell characters one by one, or that we are adding things later that should have been there from the start."

Sakurai then snuck in a, "what I can say now about paid DLC is that we aren't working on anything at the moment." At the moment. Five months later and Lucas (previously in Brawl) is set to join Super Smash Bros. as paid DLC, while Nintendo has set up a webpage for fans to suggest characters to come to Smash as future DLC.

Nothing I've stated backs your point. The destructoid source you posted is precisely exercising the "Sakurai didn't say that" webpage states about people mis-reading Sakurai's comments, especially in the title "studio's reversal on Paid DLC" (something Sakurai never said).

> "In light of this, we always need to weigh up both sides of this topic and carefully consider whether it really is best to have DLC or not."

> "Creating DLC would involve large additional costs and require the involvement of a lot of people. I can’t yet give you an answer about whether the price would justify the costs and criticisms mentioned above."

It's even worse because Destructoid, in their attempt to capitalize using cool rethoric, actually posts the same source that points out at to what was said before:

"The same goes for Sm4sh. We could have easily reserved a few characters on the current roster and later sold them as premium DLC. A considerable amount of work went into development, and the game would have already featured a ton of content. Plus, if you were looking to make a profit, DLC would be the way to go. Development is more costly than ever, yet the price of games has remained the same, so more income would help offset that imbalance.

However, the DLC we are releasing for Sm4sh is authentic, developed only after we finished working on the main game. Of course, said content will come to you at a premium as compensation for the work put into developing additional content post-production. Nintendo has the final say on the price, but given the number of man-hours spent on the creation of this DLC, I’d say it’s a great deal."

> Sakurai states that DLC which takes content out from the finished version to be sold separatedly is a scam.

> Sakurai never states Smash 4 won't have DLC.

> Sakurai states that Mewto and Lucas are being released as a premium item, developed only after finished working on the main game.

It took five months (seven, if we take 3DS' version release) for Mewto to appear on Smash, so I'd say that's enough time to justify the character actually being made from scratch after the game released.

A lot depends on how well the game is received. Having every Smash character all in one game sounds fairly ambitious at first, but then I realized that they are probably using the same game engine that Smash 4 was built with, so it's much less work for them than it sounds. The Smash 4 engine is fine, I guess, but will it feel like a unique entry in the series?

I don't think 25 million is completely impossible, but I think it's the best case scenario. I haven't done too much research into it, but if Brawl sold 13 million on the Wii, maybe Smash Ultimate will fall in line with that, but perhaps maybe 15 million if it's received better.

Nintendo already precised it's a new engine, and even the assets are also all either new or reworked.

Seriously, Nintendo makes a 20min video on Smash's extensive changes at E3 - and yet everybody claims it's the same engine, same assets or even just the same game with some more fighters added. It's getting ridiculous at this point

If that's true, then great, but if I find out that they copy pasted a bunch of stages, characters, items, Pokemon, assist trophies, etcetera, then I'm going to be pretty pissed at you for calling me out for something that I was right about.